Explanation:
Pictured above on September 3rd, the enclosure
for the 8.2 meter telescope christened Yepun
glints dramatically in the light of the setting sun.
Later that evening,
under dark skies at Paranal Observatory,
Chile,
astronomers and engineers successfully captured
Yepun's first light images,
making Yepun the fourth and final unit of
the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT)
array to reach this milestone.
Ultimately, the light from the three other 8.2 meter
unit telescopes (Antu, Kueyen,
and Melipal) will be combined with Yepun's to achieve
an effective
aperture
of 16.4 meters -- creating the
world's largest
optical
telescope.
But the next major step will be to combine beams from two of the telescopes
creating an interferometer.
The upper part of the mostly subterranean interferometer lab is the
building in front of the telescope enclosure.
The VLT unit telescope names have been taken from the
Mapuchelanguage.
Originally thought to refer to the bright star Sirius,
the
word Yepun is now
believed by linguists to mean Venus or
evening star.